Hi, everybody, I'm Ian Zaffino. I'm the equity research analyst over at Oppenheimer that covers Consensus Cloud. Good morning to people on the West Coast, good afternoon to people on the East Coast. With me today is Scott Turicchi, the company's CEO, John Nebergall, who's the company's COO, Adam Varon, who is the Senior Vice President of Finance, and then lastly, Johnny Hecker, the EVP of Operations. With that, the way I'll structure this is it'll be a fireside chat. I have plenty of questions to ask, but if anyone else on the line wants to ask a question, please put it in the chat, or you could directly email me at ian.zaffino@opco.com. With that, guys, thank you for joining us.
Ian, Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, glad, glad you could make it. So you reported earnings, very, very recently.
A few hours ago, yeah.
Yeah, a few hours ago. Give us a sense of kinda what surprised you, what were you happy about, and maybe just give us some general commentary on the business and where you see it and where it's headed tomorrow.
Yeah, maybe I could start, Ian, by giving a little bit of context. Obviously, this is a fireside chat and not a formal presentation. I would direct any of you who are new to Consensus, there's a plethora of materials on our website, including a broader corporate IR presentation that gets into sort of the history of the company and the services that we provide and the markets that we approach. Let me just give a quick highlight and overview of the company, and then I'll dive into your questions that's more specific to the quarter. We had our roots going back actually many years ago as a cloud fax company, originally known as JFax. Over the years, that company grew up to become a much larger company, really, a portfolio of companies known as J2 Global.
In October of 2021, so we're coming up on the two-year anniversary, Consensus Cloud Solutions was spun out of J2 Global, which then became Ziff Davis, primarily a digital media company. In our case, there's been a vast evolution in the company over its history. From a customer standpoint, we started originally only servicing individuals, and the assumption at the time was that the individual, whether they were working for themselves or for a larger company, would self-select a service and then utilize it for their work, and then it would be up to them whether they got reimbursement from their company. Over the years, we began to see that there were patterns of users, and that those users mapped to medium-sized companies and very large companies.
So over the years, we set up a variety of, we'll call them, channels to address different forms of customer acquisition. Yesterday, Johnny, in the presentation, went through where we currently sit, what we call our buyer or sales motion, because we really have a continuum of customers that range from the true individual, which sometimes we call small office, home office, all the way up through the very largest of enterprises and government agencies. Also within this timeframe, we've always focused on primarily regulated industries, because our whole thesis, whether it was under J2 or as a standalone company, is really the secure movement of high valuable information. It might be contractual in nature, it might be loan documents, it might be legal documents.
The phase that we are in now, and has come in the last few years, is really the healthcare sector or the healthcare space. We think of it more as a sector because there's many different subspaces that constitute the healthcare sector within primarily the United States being our focus. Not only do we bring our fax services, our cloud fax services to the healthcare space, and we have a very nice book of business there, which is both HIPAA compliant, and a third party known as HITRUST, certifies the security of those solutions. We also have a suite of we call advanced interoperable solutions, because one of the big challenges that healthcare has faced over the last...
It's probably been forever, but the last 15-20 years, is a plethora of technologies that are out there, particularly in the form of electronic health record systems, that don't communicate either at all or very well with each other and amongst each other. So as anybody knows, that's, you know, had to visit a, a, a series of healthcare facilities or doctors, how you get your patient records in the aggregate so that there's a complete picture, can be challenging. So what we find is that, first and foremost, fax is heavily used in the transmission, particularly of personal medical information, amongst the various providers, hospitals, and facilities. There are additional protocols, such as HL7, FHIR, Direct Secure Messaging, which also can be used.
Our goal is to make that use seamless amongst those protocols, and really provide the, the user or the customer of ours, the choice by which they want to send that information. If they're on the recipient end, how information can be translated from one format to another. On a very broad basis, that's what we do. What we have seen over the last, you know, couple of years since spin, is an accelerated investment for us, primarily organically, meaning in our own people and our own technologies, through both direct expense and capitalized expense, as we build out new services. Now to go to the answer to your question. A lot of what was, I wouldn't say necessarily surprising, but positive in the quarter, as I mentioned in my remarks yesterday, didn't produce any revenue in the quarter....
But they are green shoots for the future that are really important to us. Starting with what will probably at some point be our largest single customer, which is the Veterans Administration. We've had a contract through our prime, Cognosante, for a couple of years now. There was a, a phase of both building the system and then having it certified for government use, and then the phase that we have just concluded is the initial rollout. That was really important because the VA has over 2,000 facilities in which it provides services, and they range from small clinics to very large hospitals. So they wanted a test set of sites that encompassed a certain number of facilities. So it was 10 sites, 40 facilities.
What you find out, and this is true in any of our corporate deployments, is the modes by which fax are sent and received, 'cause our contract with the VA is for, for cloud fax services, is not as simple as you might think. There's actually, in these facilities, and in most organizations, several ways by which the, the faxes are sent and received. There could be physical devices on the floor, multifunction devices, a server or server farm, and there could also be some form of electronic communication that maps to a desktop or to an existing system. When you go in and you start to convert a given facility or a given, you know, set of sites, you have to understand all of the use cases and all of the forms by which they are using fax.
That took quite a while, even for the VA and their various entities, to unpack all of that. I'm happy to say, as we announced yesterday, that we've completed that first phase. It actually ended at the end of July, those 10 sites and 40 facilities. They were rather small, but they represent less than 2% of the total number of facilities within the VA. Now we go to the next phase, and there's a big meeting that we'll be having at the end of this month, which will encompass us, representatives of the VA, representatives of those facilities, as well as Cognosante, as we now get to the next phase, which is: how do we roll out, and on a more aggressive basis, the other roughly 2,000 facilities that are out there?
While this phase doesn't produce a lot of revenue for us, there's a little bit of revenue, it was really the test case to set the stage for the future. As we said yesterday, stay tuned, because as we get through this meeting at the end of August, we'll be able to have more commentary about what a rollout looks like as we exit 2023 and go into 2024. That was one big positive takeaway from the quarter. The other was, and we've said this for a long time, that we were very near landing our first Clarity customer. We had been working with an organization for the better part of a year to refine that solution to meet their needs, and I'm happy to say that contract was signed.
It is in the area of what is known as prior authorizations. We actually. This process, for us, was very instructive, in that we built a platform, we built a technological platform that can do many different things. What the market really wants is something that addresses, in often cases, a very specific need. For this customer, it's prior authorizations. For other customers, we're gonna be rolling out what we call Clarity CD. You'll see an announcement probably coming next week, which is for clinical documentation, and then sometime next year, we're calling it Clarity RF, which is for referrals. We're taking the core mother platform, and we're evolving it, and if you will, productizing it, to meet specific demands that exist out there in the healthcare space.
Once again, to land that first customer, to get it launched after a number of months of testing and evolution of the service, including adding elements to it that were not contemplated when the service was designed, probably the most difficult of which is handwriting, which is critical in the prior auth because a large portion of prior auths, at least in part, are handwritten. That was another key element. Then, while it technically didn't occur in the quarter, it's actually occurred in Q3, we're seeing, through our sales realignment, a lift in the pipeline, and some of these large customers that unfortunately we've been talking about for the better part of a year, are starting to land. They did not affect Q2's results.
They, because of their ramp cycle, will have some impact on Q3 and Q4, but we're really looking forward to 2024 in terms of the full revenue potential. That was all the positives in the quarter. I would say, you know, look, we were a little light on the top line. T hat's never great, because we do see a continuation of what we talked about, feel like we're a broken record, but there is a real slowness in decision-making, particularly in the healthcare sector, which is where all of these advanced interoperable solutions cater to. While we do have a book of business that is outside of healthcare, I would say almost two-thirds to 70% of our incremental revenue and new customers come from the healthcare space.
As that space goes, it has a tremendous influence on the pace at which we land new business. That's just one takeaway. We also, you know, had some good things below the line. We started to invest our cash, thanks to the Fed, we're getting, you know, a reasonably decent yield as we build our cash balances. We did not see the full effect of that in Q2, as we didn't have as much cash through the quarter that we do now, and two, we began the investments. It was interesting, it was actually hard to set up particularly in, well, even in the U.S., but certainly in foreign jurisdictions, interest-bearing accounts post-SVB. I'm happy to say those are all set up. We're investing an increasing amount of our total cash, that's helping below the line.
Then our tax department was able to find some incremental benefits, through our basically intercompany transfers, and tax structure. As a result, as you heard yesterday, we expect our tax rate to be at the lower end of the range of what we guided to when we budgeted, which is about 1% point lower. That's kind of a, in a nutshell, puts and takes.
That, that's very helpful, and thanks for that overview of what's going on. You know, maybe if we kind of pick it piece by piece, if you think about the VA, you know, how is the... Are they happy with the rollout? Do you think it's going to go to every single VA? Is it only going to go to the ones you thought it was? You know, and what's the potential as far as revenues if you're able to get more penetration than you thought you would get?
Well, I think it will ultimately go to all of the VA facilities. The discussion right now is what is the rollout? The way the VA phased it is they chose these 10 initial sites and 40 facilities. During this process, because it became known that the service was available and usable, it wasn't just in development, there is a program that they launched and what they call early adopters. These are people that have raised their hands saying, "We want to go next." Now, the way phase I worked is things went, you know, in series. One facility was up, or one site was up with a series of facilities, then you move to the next one, and you move to the next one, and move to the next one. The question now becomes, one, the pace.
We believe the pace can roll out faster than what was done in this initial phase, but there needs to be some prioritization because there's too many facilities to do them all at once. Because one of the things that's critical is not only the cut-over from a technical standpoint, but the training of the employees who will be using the system. There has to be training, there has to be webinars, and there has to be after-the-fact support. I think the VA is rightly, you know, concerned, but they don't want to just dump the service onto people and have them confused and not know what's going on. That's really what the meeting at the end of August is all about.
Everything we know to date indicates the VA is very satisfied with the rollout that has gone on to date. They're very happy with the service. Now it's really a question of the pace and the ordering of these remaining 2,000 facilities. You know, we've said before, we reaffirm, albeit the timeframe may be somewhat off, there's at least a $10 million revenue business within the VA. As I say, we barely scratched the surface, not even covering 2% of the facilities that they operate, and these would be at the smaller end of the spectrum. John or Johnny, I don't know if you'd like to add any further comments on, on the VA and its rollout and potential?
Yeah, I, I think the other thing is that, that's important is the, the feedback. Yeah, the VA has been monitoring very closely what the feedback from the end users was around the experience and understanding, you know, what things look like in terms of requests for help or tickets being raised through tech support. And I'm very happy to say all of those have been, yeah, really outstanding in terms of the satisfaction of the customers, the kind of absence of tickets that needed to be addressed, and the way that the rollouts kept to the schedule, once we finally got it, of when we were supposed to be up and running, we were able to be up and running. I think that hitting on all cylinders was important.
Being able to have that great feedback from the users was important, and I think that puts us in a very good position, our, you know, ECFax partnership with Cognosante, to be able to push for an accelerated rollout and hopefully be able to look to the back part of this year and through next year with a solid pace of new facilities coming up.
[crosstalk]
There's a side benefit to all this, which we've talked about before. There continues to be an increasing amount of other federal agencies interested in the solution. Those have moved from, you know, indications of interest to now, at least in certain cases, actual direct conversations of what that would look like. Would it mean certain agencies piggybacking on the solution already built, which would have the advantage of go to market quicker? And we believe it's going to be probably both, will there be customization needed to accommodate certain agencies' workflows? Those are early stage.
Certainly none of those will produce any revenue this year, but I think, you know, if we can land some of those and move them to, you know, indications of interest to contract, then depending upon the nature of whether they're going to piggyback or require customization, that would influence in 2024 and beyond sort of how those other agencies would flow into the revenue stream. I think all in all, the VA, albeit slower than we would like and slower than our previous anticipated views, has a lot of positives in it, not only within the VA system itself, but as a broader halo effect to other federal agencies, and they're numbering about around 30 right now.
Okay. Wow, wow, that's pretty impressive. You know, and Scott, you also talked on Clarity. Can you just back up a little bit and tell us, you know, what exactly Clarity is?
Sure.
How you've gone from sort of, you know, what was its original intention as far as, as single kind of, product, and now what can it actually become?
Yeah, so Clarity uses natural language processing or artificial intelligence, because one of the things that is an advantage, if you look at the suite of other interoperable solutions that I went through very quickly, like HL7, FHIR, and Direct Secure Messaging, all ways of communication within the healthcare sector, is they have the ability to transmit pieces of data. Now, when faxes are sent back and forth, they're pictures, they're images, so it's looked at as, you know, a page is just one holistic item. What tends to happen today is those documents may be printed out or may not, but people will key in where they have an EHR, the relevant information, such that it's structured data.
The view of Clarity, the vision of Clarity, and it still is the vision of Clarity, is really any document that is a picture. It could be a fax, it could not be a fax. To take any document, no matter what its purpose, and to be able to extract the relevant information, so that in whatever database you want to put that information, you can do that. As I say, we've designed it first and foremost for our healthcare customers, because we see the greatest need there in this, you know, multiplicity of modes of transport, and this lack of being able to speak the same language when you have either two different systems or one party that has a system and one party that does not.
That's the thesis underlying, and I think that we were, we were maybe overly ambitious when we started out, because we said, "We want to solve all use cases. We want Clarity to be..." I say, "There's a robust engine that will extract any kind of data, any kind of content, from any kind of form, for any kind of use case." When we went to the proof of concept, it, it so happened, the entity that was the most interested at the time happened to have a heavy bias towards prior authorizations. They were looking at it from a more narrow perspective. They go, "That's nice".
You can do all this other stuff, but we need to really solve what is our concern, which is all these prior auths are coming in, and we've got a lot of human labor that's having to intercept them, and, and input them, and deal with them, and it's a, both a time delay, it's an expense, and it's prone to error. That's where the whole process started. What was, I think, a, a, an aha moment for them, was how much handwriting exists on these prior auth forms. Because the, the assumption kind of collectively was, well, it's all typewritten. When you've got typing, you know, traditional fonts, it's a lot easier to decipher that, and over time, you know, the machine learning will recognize this field is a name, that's a zip code, and these are numbers, not letters, et cetera.
They... The curveball was, a significant portion, either in whole or in part, had handwriting. They threw it back, the challenge to us to say, "For this to really work, we need to accommodate handwriting." That took where we needed to go up several levels, and it took time to figure that out, and to be able to have significant enough confidence intervals on handwriting. You know what handwriting looks like, and you've seen particularly doctor's handwriting. It's not often that legible, even to the human eye. That took a number of months and iterations to get to the point where they said, "Yes, you've got an acceptable level." It's never gonna be perfect, because there is bad handwriting, and you just need to call that physician or whatever and say, "What does this mean?" Or call somebody.
That light bulb went off to say, well, wait a minute, if we think in different chunks, we've now, you know, got to the point where we've got a solution for prior auth. Let's not try to deal with anything else they're dealing with. Just deal with the prior auth. What are the other use cases that we can narrow down? It's also, by the way, I think, better from a marketing standpoint, because if you go in and you say, "We're dealing with prior auth, we're dealing with clinical documents, we're dealing with referrals," they go, "Okay, I got it. I understand," even though the fundamental platform has the capabilities of doing significantly more.
I think for us it was a learning process that we started with a very grand ambition, and we've now narrowed it down to individual, we call them apps, that ride on the platform. If you think of it, those apps can then go beyond healthcare. The challenge for us as a company is, you know, we're of a certain size, and our emphasis is on healthcare. Things like applying Clarity to the legal profession or various elements of the finance profession is unfortunately gonna be down the road for us. We just don't have the internal cycles to be building what we'll call the apps, to ride on the platform for those various other industry or those use cases within those industries. Clarity clearly has applicability across the board for any institution that is receiving images.
As I say, it doesn't have to come via fax, PDF file, whatever, but they're receiving images in, and they want that to become unpacked, and they want it to be structured data.
Okay, thank you. you know, and as far as just the overall business, has the economy and the way that business performed surprised you in that, SOHO's held up actually pretty well, despite, you know, pricing, whereas the corporate business hasn't... I mean, it's still growing faster, but hasn't, versus expectations, maybe hasn't held up?
Right.
Can you maybe, like, just talk about that a little bit and?
I actually think it's a good bifurcation. I think the SOHO business or the SOHO customer stream is so diverse that it is more reflective of the economy as a whole. You know, we thought going into this year there'd be a recession in the back half of the year. That seems to not be the case, certainly in real time, and I think most people are saying maybe there won't be a recession, or if it is, it'll be in 2024, and it'll probably be very mild. We see the evidence of that in the way SOHO's performing. We see the evidence that we inflicted, for those that are not aware, a price change of about 13%-14% across the board, phased in over a year.
That just completed June 30th, we expected that during the pendency of that price increase, we'd be running cancel rates about 3.8%. In fact, it was lower than that, and the quarter we just ended was 3.57. Price changes were still going on, that 3.57 is very close to the norm, 3.5. I actually think, lacking a recession, that cancel rate will go through 3.5. It will go lower than 3.5. That shows, I think, that, one, the price changes were able to be absorbed, the economy, you know, as we've seen with macro data, is good enough, the cancel rate is also buttressing that.
I think those two things are working in tandem, and that is a, you know, modest positive surprise relative to our expectations. When you go to the corporate business, it's a more complex answer. While certainly the broader economy is relevant, you have to look at what's going on in specific sectors, unfortunately, in the healthcare space, particularly healthcare IT, they've had more challenges and headwinds from both a, you know, I'd call it a budgetary standpoint and a labor standpoint. You know, our solutions that we've been discussing, you need implementation, and we will be there to assist. Our counterparties, you know, they know their own systems and how these solutions are going to fit into their own workflows and be integrated in. If they don't have staff ready to integrate, they're gonna delay signing a contract, and that's what we've seen.
That, it did surprise us on the negative side, 'cause we knew even a year ago that we were seeing a slowness in decision-making, but it has persisted, notwithstanding a, you know, what I'd call a decent or okay economy. You know, it's not terrible, but yes, it's below our expectations when you look at, at the healthcare space, and that's such a key driver of our corporate business.
Okay, understood. you know, I know we touched on Clarity. Can you just touch on Harmony a little bit? Again, tell us what it is. I know you've had, you know, your first POC there, so, you know, what...
We haven't talked a lot about Harmony since the spin, 'cause, you know, at the time of the spin, it was way out there on the right in terms of, you know, the future. It's like, okay, focus more on the near-term things like jSign, Unite, and Clarity. Harmony, yeah, we've not given a lot of airtime. It's in still very early phases, but it is good that we're at this phase right now. Johnny, why don't you take over and discuss it, 'cause you, you just landed that relationship.
Yeah. Yeah, basically what, what Harmony is, it's where, where many of our technologies come together into one platform, right? Really, customers of any size, in the healthcare industry can connect to it and exchange data coming in in one way, and then leaving it in, in another way, with a translation and transition in between. It could be, you know, it could be a fax, and then we actually capture some of that data, and turn it into, you know, structured data and move it out as an HL7 message. It's really where, where many of our technologies, Clarity, Conductor, potentially Unite as a user interface, come together for our healthcare customers to connect and exchange documents for...
What we're doing, and we see the first, you know, Clarity CD is actually part of that solution. It's going in that direction. We have, we have customers now asking us for like, to deliver to them faxes, not as a fax anymore through a traditional, through our traditional interfaces, but for example, as a Direct Secure Message so they can process it more quickly, so they don't have to, you know, manage fax infrastructures or interconnects anymore. That's really where it's going. We have that first proof of concept that is out there, that we're working. We're in the process of negotiating that contract. We have customers, and this is, this is a large platform provider.
We have customers lining up to actually get onto that platform and use it to, you know, eliminate some of the difficulties that, that fax brings along technically.
The way you can think of it is the vision. When you think about... I mean, we're once again, we're dealing with a proof of concept, relatively [audio distortion] . Think of it as we're sitting as the hub, and anybody can send us information or document, any form they want, direct to us, whom the recipient is, and the recipient can say: "I want to receive it in this format or these variety of formats," and we would translate it, direct it, and send it. We, we'd sit in the middle as the hub of all of this information that's flowing back and forth, and the two counterparties can be agnostic as to the mode in which it is being sent, because they can send it in whatever mode they want, and the recipient can receive it in whatever form they want.
That's... You know, we're not there yet. It's not Harmony full release. So, you know, we're still very much focused from a sales standpoint on the Clarity set of services, but I think it is a, once again, another green shoot that we're seeing for the future, regarding Harmony and the fact that, you know, there's validation that the product or the service has a use case out there.
Okay, perfect.
Don't expect any revenue from it, you know, initially. This is like, you know, I always tell the guys, "I hate to announce anything, because then the next question is, 'Well, how much revenue? How much revenue next quarter? How much revenue next year?" It's early, okay? Harmony in particular is early. I think, you know, our goal, I'll preempt what may be a question of yours or on people's mind, our goal is really to use the balance of this year to gain enough data so that we can put some numbers behind the VA next year, possibly some other government agencies, Clarity in its various forms. You know, I think Harmony will still be relatively early and probably not meaningfully contributory to our overall revenue streams.
That's, that's really, for us, the goal and the balance of the remaining four and a half, five months of the year. We've got a lot of these, as I say, green shoots that are coming up, but it's hard to predict how much revenue today they would produce in discrete, you know, timeframes. Over time, we have a good idea, but obviously, people care how much it contributes in 2024 or 2025, or specific quarters. So that's really a, a big focus of ours, is to, you know, analyze these early customers, these early use cases, and get hopefully a robust set of data so that we can, as I say, have some confidence of how we bake that into our 2024 guidance and budget.
Understood, perfect. You know, as far as cash flow and capital allocation, I know coming out you had a lot of free cash flow. The idea was to, you know, build up that cash flow and eventually just take out some of your notes. Rates are significantly higher now than they were, you know, when you first kinda set that plan in place. How, how are you thinking about capital allocation in this environment? You know, what should we expect with the cash flow?
Yeah, I mean, there's four ways we can deploy our capital. Let's say, you know, historically, meaning in the short two years since the spin, we've only utilized two, and there have been some restrictions on us. First, we have increased the investment in the business itself versus under the prior ownership. You see that in the CapEx on, you know, our, our statements. You also see it in, to a lesser extent, the expense portion in, say R&D. All those things are up versus, when we were part of the J2 family. That's kind of the first set of it, but that's now baked into our numbers.
When you think of the, what I'll call the excess or the cash sitting on the balance sheet after we've already done that, we've been limited to date because we had certain restrictions placed on us in the spin, that we could not do anything with the debt for at least two years. Well, that two-year anniversary is coming up in October. Yes, we've built cash in anticipation of the retirement of a portion of our debt, but we've done some, you know, selective, opportunistic buybacks of the stock. Certainly, as, as it has pulled in, it's become more attractive to us. We bought 530,000 shares. Roughly about 20% of our $100 million program has been spent since we launched that program in February of 2022, through the end of Q2.
We will continue to, you know, look at the stock, based on where it trades. It's a bit tricky because, you know, what are the right multiples? 'Cause we don't have a, what I call a natural set of comparables. We're, we're part healthcare IT, we're part sort of SaaS or cloud services. While it, it's pretty clear that, you know, when you amalgamate, like, our own comp set that we use in the proxy statement of the 10-K, we traded a, you know, at a discount on most of the multiples that you would look at, particularly in terms of profitability, like EBITDA or net income. However, we tend to grow more slowly than some of those companies, so there's a, a compensating factor.
You know, it's an element that is there for us to look at when we think of the stock, but it's not definitive or absolute. We do, because of what you said and our view that the interest rate environment is not likely to return to where it was in the summer of 2021, we think that over time, we, we need to reduce some of the debt. We don't want to refinance $805 million of debt, which is what we had at spin. We will be looking, as we enter the window come October, ways that we can retire some of the debt. I mean, there are ways to do it.
The shorter-term notes are callable, but they're callable at a premium, 103, and we wouldn't pay the premium because given the rise in interest rates, the bonds trade at, you know, somewhere in the low nineties. We'll be studying, you know, that and see what is possible or likely, particularly to get, you know, more than a de minimis amount of the securities retired. Certainly, it will be our goal over time to allocate a portion of our cash for the retirement of debt in whatever form that comes. You will, you will see that, you know, maybe not so much this year, but as we think into 2024, and we think particularly into 2025, about how much of those 6% Notes, of which there's $305 million, will need to be refinanced and in what markets.
It gives us some time. Hopefully, by the time we come to that date, there's at least stability in the interest rate environment and hopefully at a lower level than currently exists. To your point, we have experienced, since the spin, a dramatic change in interest rates to the negative.
Right. Right. Right, and
The last piece, which is not active right now, is M&A. Over time, you know, if you look out and you don't think of discrete period, and you look over five years, there will be a portion of that free cash flow that will be allocated to M&A. Don't see it in the near to intermediate term, meaning this, the balance of this year and probably through most of next year, and a lot of that has to do with our own internal priorities and the allocation of our own resources to those priorities. M&A, there's always friction in M&A. You know, as much as I love M&A and as much as was done at J2, there's always disruption. My view is right now, we have a path that we've articulated in terms of product and service evolution.
We've talked about certain things that we're cleaning up internally, such as, you know, small billing systems that just create headaches for us. Those things aren't very sexy projects, but they need to get done. That's consuming all of our technical resources and some. I mean, they're always banging on the door saying, "I need more, I need more, I need more," because Johnny, Riley, and John are saying, "Hey, we need to develop a new app for Clarity. We need to evolve Harmony. We need to do this, do this." Then Jim and Adam on the finance side are saying, "Yes, but we need to put in more software and technologies." We think about our accounting and finance system.
We need to clean up incumbent systems that carried over from the spin, that really don't serve a lot of purpose, but there's a few million dollars of revenue on this system and that system. It creates challenges when you have to aggregate them from an accounting standpoint and internal audit. That's going to keep our technical people busy for a while. We never say no to M&A in terms of we always look. You know, I've also been surprised that not withstanding the volatility in the marketplace, the questioning of the economy and the, you know, the valuations that some companies, particularly public companies, have suffered, negative valuations or diminution in valuation, the ask out there is still very robust.
That presents a whole different challenge, even if we said we were open for M&A, which is, you know, can you really justify that multiple? That is the ask, or even a slight discount to the ask. Those are all the reasons why you're not likely to see much out of us M&A-wise for a while, but it doesn't mean we're not interested or it's not part of our overall longer-term capital allocation program.
Okay, perfect. I think we're actually at our time limit here, so if there's any final words you want to say, you know, please do, otherwise, I'll let you get back to your one-on-ones.
We got one-on-ones. We appreciate it, and say thanks again for hosting us, for setting up the one-on-ones. We're going to get back to work doing that. I'll just give a little plug as I did yesterday. We do have a webinar coming up on September 7th. It's our own hosted webinar on AI and its use in the healthcare sector, and specifically how we use it. I think you'll find it very informative. Jeff Sullivan, who's our CTO, and who's not on this call, will be presenting along with John Nebergall.
There will be a release out for that in terms of how you can sign up, but we encourage you to, you know, listen in and also to go to our website, because almost all of our core services have short videos there that will help you better understand what the services do and the use cases around them. We've been building this library of content so that you can kind of unpack what Consensus is all about, because I know for many, may not be focused on the healthcare space, and they. You know, the concept of interoperability is a new concept to them, and these terms that we're throwing around, like HL7 and FHIR, you know, probably doesn't mean anything. If you go to our website, there's a lot of good content there.
A lot of it is in video format, very short-form format. A couple of minutes, two, three minutes, you can learn about various services. Thanks again for having us.
All right. Thank you very much. Thanks, Ian.
Appreciate, Ian. Thank you.
Thanks, Ian.
Thank you, Ian.